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Drink Up!
Your Guide to Home Brewing Made Easy
Amazing ebook shows how to get started, fantastic recipes, and tricks of home brew!
wwwHomeBrew.com
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If you are shopping around any internet site or catalog because you're in the market for some home brewing equipment, you may notice a lot of very large and pointed ads that strongly encourage you to buy their sanitizers and sanitizing products. Your first thought might be that this is just a waste of time; you can just wash your own fermenting containers, airlocks, and boiling pots at home (or better yet, have your spouse do it!) with regular dish soap. After all, if that bottle of Palmolive is good enough for your plates and glasses, it should be good enough for your home brewing equipment, right? Actually, there's a reason why those sanitizers are advertised right along with your equipment, and a reason why you should be using those products instead of your regular dish soap.
Home brewing equipment is not like any other set of dishes or cookware in your home. It's highly unlikely that you have active cultures and live microbial elements in your other dishes; most of the food that you eat is dead and cooked. When you add yeast to your mixture, that yeast reacts with the sugar in your wort, which is what eventually turns to alcohol. However, any residual amounts of yeast and sugar left over in your home brewing equipment will continue to react with each other, even if you can't see that going on with the naked eye.
Allowing these microbial elements to flourish without getting rid of them is definitely going to affect all of your later batches of beer, and may even introduce harmful bacteria that can make you sick, if they're not taken care of properly. Most manufacturers of home brewing equipment recommend that you do indeed wash the equipment with hot water or with dish soap, but that you then sanitize everything right after. This sanitizing step does more than just remove surface dirt, which is all that washing and rinsing is going to do for your home brewing equipment. Rather, it removes all traces and elements of your previous batches and doesn't allow them to continue to flourish.
Remember that brewing is a chemical process and that yeast is an active culture, not something dead like meat or eggs. You can wash your regular dinner dishes in hot water and soap and be assured that everything is properly cleaned, but your home brewing equipment is more like lab equipment than dinner dishes. It needs to have all traces of your "experiments" or brewing processes removed in order to be ready for your next batch.
So don't hesitate when you see those advertisements for sanitizers made especially for home brewing equipment. The manufacturers aren't encouraging you to buy them just so that they'll make more money; they know that this is a very important step in having a successful brewing process. They are usually very affordable anyway, so you should definitely consider using them in order to properly care for and maintain your own home brewing equipment.
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